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ombres

ombres@wyrmsign.org

Joined 2 years, 9 months ago

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ombres's books

Jan Wong: Jan Wong's China (1999, Doubleday Canada) 4 stars

Y'know... pretty good

4 stars

I can't do 3.5 stars, eh? I lean towards 4 cuz I liked it, but IDK if a lot of other people would like it.

Wong is a journalist born and raised in Montréal, whose family owned a restaurant in the Snowdon/Décarie area to my recollection, about my mom's age. Circa the '70s, she became a Maoist and moved to China. Like Emma, she was disillusioned, but unlike Emma, she heelturned completely on any kind of revolutionary imaginary as far as I can tell. This comes through if you ever listened to her talk to Jesse Brown on Canadaland Short Cuts.

I picked this up at a used book store a few years ago, but never cracked it open until earlier this year. Every chapter is laser-focused on a broad subject matter of one kind or another, and it weaves together anecdotes from her time in China as a youth, …

I finished this book two days ago! It was a marathon.

I liked it. It definitely explained a lot more about this guy than I ever knew before, how he was very unpopular during his time in Israel, and how what he thought it is actually quite different from the neo-Kahanism that now exists, which is equally mixed in with this other thing called Kookeanism from two rabbis, father and son, who are way more into basically millenarian waiting-for-the-end-times, rather than Kahane's, like, practical fascism.

I'd mostly recommend it but it was a slog towards the end.